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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.
Previously…
Lefty hired Enrique's crew to pour an acre of concrete behind the house, five hundred thousand pebble shapes as a scale model for Gaines's wealth. When Kelly returned from her walkabout, she was confused, touched, and ultimately inspired by Lefty’s monument. They reconciled and there was an understanding that Daedalia would come back for one more spectacle.
The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.
May 1, 2022
I feel like I’m melting away. It’s such a weird sensation. I wake up in the morning and there’s just less of me. How is that possible? I really don’t understand. It’s not like I feel sick exactly, just thinner somehow, like the cells in my body are a little further apart than they used to be. Maybe this is just what getting older feels like.
The same thing that’s happening to me is happening with my work. What used to take me a day or a week now takes months. I still have the torrent of ideas spilling out of Ona. She’s still with me, but it’s taking me a lot longer to interpret what she’s saying. The ideas are so small and far apart, so distributed across a vast horizon that I can’t make sense of how they fit together or if they do. I can’t see the edges of the canvas yet. And that’s scary.
Lefty tries to be gentle and patient, but I feel his constant, persistent push. He’s made promises. It’s not helping that he’s gotten cozier with Trevor Gaines. I know Lefty despises him and that this is just a chess maneuver, but I also think he can’t help but be a little bit seduced by the guy. This tech bro elder whose ideas brought massive changes to the world, many good and many disastrous.
As for the panels, I’m not sure if he really has them. Maybe some survived. On 9/11, the spectacular pain and terror I felt watching those poor people leap to their deaths completely annihilated any intuition I usually have about my work and where it is in the world. Those twelve panels I poured my soul into died that day, even if some survived. I’ve tried to close my eyes and invite Ona to reach out, to look for them. I get flickers and flashes that make no sense. It’s like looking through a shattered window. The images are a kaleidoscope of geometry and color, shards of feeling but no picture. I know anything close to tangible is manufactured, corrupted by my imagination, tainted by what Greta has told us about seeing them in that bunker on a private island. I don’t tell Lefty any of this. It’s never been useful for me to talk about what happens in my head to anyone.
More and more, I want to go back home. I never thought I would miss home, but I do. I miss the mountains. This high desert landscape is still beautiful, but the wide-open sky feels like it will swallow me these days. I miss the humidity and the lush green of trees that make you feel embraced and protected. Lefty has promised he will look for a little place for us back in Black Mountain, a place where I can work. But I know our finances aren’t what they used to be. And I know he feels an immense amount of guilt about that. We don’t talk about his art project in the backyard. As I stare at it from our bedroom window, there are weeds peeking out between the seams, and almost half the acre of concrete is covered in sand. The landscape is reclaiming it, and I kind of like that.
Marabelle is thriving in NYC, and I’m happy for that, but honestly a little jealous. I never got to experience that extended adolescence. She can’t get enough school, it seems. So different from me. She’s always been a very serious person, no-nonsense. She tries to hide the fact that she’s having a little fun, and it’s cute. Sometimes I’ll catch her on a Saturday, and I can hear friends laughing in the background. It takes a few words for her to mask the smile I can hear in her voice.
July 21, 2022
A week ago I pulled a leaf blower out of the shed and worked all morning trying to clear the surface of Lefty’s acre. He heard me and came out to help. I think he was touched to see my sudden interest in it. I wasn’t doing it for him, but I’m happy anytime by accident I do something to please him. We left the weeds. The concrete has weathered in a beautiful way, blending in with the landscape and yet still kind of alien. The texture looks like the scales of some massive creature surfacing from beneath the scrubby earth around it.
I’ve been coming out at sunrise while it’s still cool to walk its dimensions or just to sit in different places and watch how the light transforms everything it touches. I’m having trouble restricting my work to the smallness of a canvas. No matter how big the canvas, it feels confining and one-dimensional. I’m reaching for something deeper and more universal, more connected.
I can’t read for shit, but I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts by scientists, philosophers, and people that might just be kooks who push the conventional bounds of what we accept as reality. I’m searching for something. Itching to understand something I’ve always known but never been able to articulate. It’s about the idea of a mind. Not a brain or anything obviously physical that we can touch, examine, or dissect, but a universal mind. A wisdom that is the wireframe beneath everything. We only see glimpses of it when it peeks through our reality, our rational plane. Smarter people than me—doctors, biologists, chemists, and physicists call these anomalies “emerging properties.” But I think it’s a lazy explanation, like cartographers once writing: “beyond here lie monsters” at the edge of a map. The point is, there’s far more we don’t see than what we do see in this world. It’s dizzying, and I get why we humans want to just tape off little boundaries to feel safe and keep our heads from exploding. But I don’t. I want to blow the top off of it.
I don’t know what any of this “research” means for the project I’m supposed to be doing, but I know I can’t just draw a picture and capture what I want to capture anymore. There’s also this feeling of urgency too, which makes it doubly frustrating because I can’t seem to start anything right now.
September 8, 2022
I’ve agreed to meet Trevor, maybe against my better judgment, especially now that I’ve started working on what is basically a commission for him. It’s not a big deal, at least for him because he’s got no idea I’m the artist. It’s just a private dinner he’s hosting with a few “close friends.” I told Lefty it’s a stupid idea for a few reasons. If I really end up fucking hating him, there’s no way I’ll be able to make anything. Also, I’m shit at social things even when there are no big stakes involved, and the stakes are pretty high for this. I’ll have to pretend to be the little wifey who paints roosters on salvaged doors and rusty watering cans. What could possibly go wrong?!
But the reason I agreed is because I’m curious. What interests me about Trevor is the scale of his life. Not the scale of his finances, that’s Lefty’s thing, but the scale of his technology—the reach of it. I don’t really understand the most fundamental things about the software his companies have created, but I do understand the impact. I understand that he’s been in the business of making the impossible possible—the unseen seen. In that way, I think we’re kindred spirits.
I’ve been going down a wormhole lately on AI. There’s been some breakthrough that they’re still trying to understand—another “emergent property” that got me interested. Anytime weird things happen that the smartest people in the world can’t explain, I perk up. Apparently they’d all but given up on the original theory of how AI would work because no matter how many modifications they made to their approach, it just hit this invisible ceiling. Then some guys just said, fuck it, make it bigger and throw more processors at it and see what happens. When they did that, just increased the scale, everything changed. I want to know more about that, what that pushing beyond the point of reasonable does—see what emerges. I think that’s where the magic is, out beyond the boundaries of the rules we’ve arbitrarily created to impose order.
Anyway, the thing I’m working on is hard to describe. It will be kind of an installation when it’s done, but I can’t imagine a space that will be able to hold it. It’s not going to be a series of objects that can be framed or mounted and put on display in a gallery. I’ve not broken this to Lefty yet. I think it’s my unpredictable shit that keeps him young. But he would argue otherwise.
I know I’m getting close to something because I have that uncomfortable feeling I get when the work is going to begin. What makes this so different is I’m not drawn to go to the easel. It feels bigger. I also think it will involve technology somehow. I’ve resisted this for a few months because I really don’t want to have to use a fucking computer. I’ve always been confounded by them, but I’ve become more and more curious as I study these makers who are pushing boundaries in code. They’re summoning something from nothing just like me. Just like me, they don’t really understand the thing that’s emerging, how it works or where it will lead.
September 11, 2022
I woke up in the middle of the night. I’ve not done that for a while. I’ve been more grounded lately. Lefty and I sleep together, and his nearness is a comfort even if he does snore. So when I woke up with my heart racing, it was unfamiliar. I looked over at my phone and saw the date and understood my dreams. A sky choked with smoke and ash, everywhere the rumbling roar of destruction—twisting metal, crushing concrete. It’s a dream I lived inside for a time—hearing all those screaming voices—but it’s been a while. I can’t go back to sleep. I’ve made some tea and I’m going to sit here on the couch in the living room to wait for the sun to rise so I can go outside and work. Try to exorcise this.
Every part of me hurts. Two days ago as I was walking the acre, I began to see what the work would be, or at least the first part of it. I got down on my hands and knees and started tracing my fingers across the bumpy pattern on the concrete. I felt something vibrating just below the surface. It’s very cold in the early morning now, but I felt a warmth radiating up through it. I’ve felt this tingling sensation before, and usually I grab a pen or a brush. But these tools won’t do the job.
I’ve made countless trips to the hardware store. My canvas is much bigger and much harder to work with. I’ve sometimes wished I was a man at different points in my life—had the big body and strong hands to command more from the work. I especially do now, but I’m making it work. Eventually, I’ll need to employ help, though. I need an apprentice or apprentices. Lefty’s not going to be a fan of that idea.
What I want to do may be beyond my physical ability, but I have to try. I see it unfolding out there on that big beautiful slab of a canvas my love created for me. He really is a wonder to me. I think of how unlikely we are, we’ve always been, and it feels less like a random act of chance that brought us together. I’m beginning to accept what I’ve always felt—there’s something that connects us, something vast, almost infinite that we can’t see or touch or even feel most of the time, but it’s there moving us toward each other. Not just me and Lefty, but all of us. Mostly it feels hopeless like things are just getting worse—more violence, more starvation, more greed, and destruction. But that’s only when you stand and observe from the middle distance. When you zoom in, put your face to the ground and observe a line of ants moving as one mind or watch a tiny drop of dew slip from the petal into the bell of a desert flower, you see the order. When you zoom out to ten thousand feet above it all, you don’t see walls and boundaries, property—you see one single, connected organism.
I want to show that. I don’t know how, but I want to show that. I must. I can’t explain the urgency, but I know I don’t have time like I did when I was a girl. I’ve been so afraid of losing my ability to do what I once did. The truth is, I have. My hands cramp horribly and I shake. Maybe this bigger canvas is just an aging woman trying to compensate for the fact that she can’t draw a straight line anymore. But Ona does what she’s always done. She shows me a new way to see things. She’s like a river. There’s no more perfect way to describe what she is. She’s always moving, transforming herself and everything she touches. Sometimes she slows to a trickle or disappears underground. Sometimes she’s roaring in flood, knocking down trees. Why is it I always fight her flow? I resist, and she goes underground for a while and then one day, without knowing, I’m floating on her back and we’re moving and I wonder what I was afraid of.
The sun’s up now. It’s so gorgeous. I’m going to bundle up and go outside to work. To work!
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Oh!!! I love what’s emerging. Kelly’s urgency is so enticing. Can’t wait for the next installment.
I have tried, and mostly failed, to imagine Kelly's paintings from the very beginning of your novel Ben and yet in these last two chapters, reading of the acre of contoured pebbles in concrete with the weeds beginning to grow through I see quite clearly; something with a modern twist on an ancient theme... like Borobudur seen from the air.
"I’ve become more and more curious as I study these makers who are pushing boundaries in code. They’re summoning something from nothing just like me."
Here I am curious too...